Archive for February, 2019

Martin and Milton. “He filled the room, with his crisp voice and laugh.” (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Recent thoughts have turned my mind again to the late Prof. Martin Evans, one of the leading John Milton scholars in the world – well, perhaps it’s no surprise, given my recent Milton Cottage residency (see here). Poet Kenneth Fields of the Stanford English Department penned this little tribute at the time of the Welshman’s death in 2013. It was never published … till now.

Ken with cup

There has never been a time when Martin Evans was not at the center of the English Department, and I’ve been here for a long time. Martin was a man of great enthusiasms. He loved food and wine, he loved teaching, he loved Milton and the Renaissance, he loved his wife, the unfailingly charming Mariella, and he loved his children. He also loved being a contrarian. But it was not enough for him to be contrary; he wanted to be right. He once complained about a former colleague, “What I hate about him is that in any conversation, he always heads for the moral high ground, usually getting there ahead of me.” Few people got anywhere ahead of Martin. He filled the room, with his crisp voice and laugh. I always thought his voice resembled that of his countryman Richard Burton, but without the deepening and coarsening effects of cigarettes and booze. I cannot think of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” without hearing Martin’s voice reading it at department Christmas parties.

About a year ago I asked several of my colleagues what they told students who were preparing to write papers. Martin’s reply was the shortest and the best: “I tell them to take me on an intellectual journey from point A to point B.” I pass this nugget on to my students every quarter, always careful to cite him, and to deliver it in Martin’s declarative voice. It’s a deceptively simple remark that needs to be passed on, and can stand some attention. First, intellectual. Second, a journey. From A to B means that there must be an A, must be a B—how often do we realize about even our own writing that there’s no A, no B? Finally, “take me on a journey.” Many of us have been taken on journeys by Martin. I intend to keep and broadcast that little sutra until I reach point B myself. Were Martin to hear me say the line that now comes to me, “They are all gone into the world of light,” he’d recognize his fellow Welsh poet, and he’d complete the sentence.

The dapper diplomat thanks a teary-eyed soldier in Boise

We’ve written about the popular new consul general at the French consulate in San Francisco – the charismatic Emmanuel Lebrun-Damiens was, after all, an honored guest at the launch party for Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. He is already a familiar figure on the Palo Alto tech scene. Now he’s a beloved figure farther afield, too. He went all the way to Idaho to say merci to a 99-year-old soldier who fought to liberate the French, and to bestow an honor he has already bestowed to a few at Stanford.

Hence on Friday, “technician fifth grade” Emil Reich was raised to the sublime rank of Chevalier in the Legion of Honour for his World War II service, where he served with the Antitank Gun Crewman 610 division. With hundreds of other servicemen, he sailed to Europe, and on June 6th, stormed the beaches in Normandy.

Reich continued on to fight in the Ardennes and Rhine region and participated in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Since he was fluent in German, he frequently traveled with higher ranking officers to speak to the citizens prior to troops approaching the towns in the Rhineland. He was wounded twice and spent time away from his division in a Paris hospital, returning to his unit after recovery.

After the end of World War II, he served as an interpreter at army camps housing German soldiers and returned in to the U.S. early in 1946.

“As a young man you left your home and family to fight and liberate not only France but the whole European continent,” said Lebrun-Damiens in an address. “Your courage and your bravery are the reason why the President of the French Republic decided to award you the highest French recognition.”

The ceremony took place on the second floor rotunda of the Idaho State Capitol building, attended by Reich’s family, as well as French Honorary Consul Mrs. Hortense Everett, Former French Honorary Consul Ms. Gabrielle Applequist, Congressman Russ Fulcher Representative Jake Ellis, Colonel Brit Vanshur Director of Staff of the Idaho National Guard, Marv Hagedorn Chief Administrator of Veteran Services, The Idaho National Guard Honor Guard, 25th Army Band, Chief of Staff of the Idaho National Guard COL Tom Rasmussen and Louis Hougaard Policy Advisor, Governor Brad Little.

The Reich family encourages any other WWII veterans who fought in France, or their family members, to reach out to the French embassy in San Francisco so they can also be recognized for their service. (Photos courtesy the French consulate)

Walter Tevis is best known for his three novels that were turned into major films: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But on January 29, Stanford took another look at his overlooked masterpiece, The Queen’s Gambit, a book about chess, and the teenage girl who masters it. The lively discussion was headed by Another Look’s founding director, the eminent author Tobias Wolff. He was joined by Robert Pogue Harrison, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and former Stanford fellow Inga Pierson. Some considered it our best event ever! Judge for yourself: the podcast of the discussion is here.

Tevis was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Sunset District. While his parents relocated to Kentucky, he spent a year in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Home (which later became Stanford’s Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital). Hence, Another Look’s winter event will be a homecoming for the author, who died in 1984.

Photos below by Another Look friend David Schwartz.

“Resonance—there is no wisdom without it.”

Sven Birkerts‘s The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, turns 25 this year. Never heard of it? A sign of our times, when everything goes blip, blip, blip under the tumultuous seas of tweets, texts, posts, and emoticons. Even a book that ponders what we need most today to fight the tide of memes, spammers, taunts, and triviality: “time of the self… deep time, duration time, time that is essentially characterized by our obliviousness to it.”

You may not have read Mairead Small Staid’s thoughtful consideration of Birkerts’s fifteen essays “on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology” over at Paris Review‘s blog. After all, few things disappear faster under the surface of public consciousness than a blogpost – like this one.

Staid writes: “As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. ‘Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,’ he wrote. ‘It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and superficiality, into the realm of duration.’”

Two excerpts:

Early in The Gutenberg Elegies, Birkerts summarizes historian Rolf Engelsing’s definition of reading “intensively” as the common practice of most readers before the nineteenth century, when books, which were scarce and expensive, were often read aloud and many times over. As reading materials—not just books, but newspapers, magazines, and ephemera—proliferated, more recent centuries saw the rise of reading “extensively”: we read these materials once, often quickly, and move on. Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface. This shift has only accelerated dizzyingly in the time since Engelsing wrote in 1974, since Birkerts wrote in 1994, and since I wrote, yesterday, the paragraph above.

Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”

***

“But perhaps when the need is strong enough we will seek out the word on the page, and the work that puts us back into the force field of deep time,” says Birkerts. “The book—and my optimism, you may sense, is not unwavering—will be seen as a haven, as a way of going off-line and into a space sanctified by subjectivity.” Oddly enough, here in the dawning days of 2019, my own optimism is strong. It seems clear to me that the need is strong enough—is as strong as it always has been and always will be—for the blossoming, bodily pleasure of reading something remarkable, the way it takes the top of my head off and shows me—palms open, an offering—what’s been churning away in there, all along.

“Resonance—there is no wisdom without it,” Birkerts writes. “Resonance is a natural phenomenon, the shadow of import alongside the body of fact, and it cannot flourish except in deep time.” But time feels especially shallow these days, as the wave of one horror barely crests before it’s devoured by the next, as every morning’s shocking headline is old news by the afternoon. Weeks go by, and we might see friends only through the funhouse mirrors of Snapchat and Instagram and their so-called stories, designed to disappear. Not even the pretense of permanence remains: we refresh and refresh every tab, and are not sated. What are we waiting for? What are we hoping to find?

We know perfectly well—we remember, even if dimly, the inward state that satisfies more than our itching, clicking fingers—and we know it isn’t here. Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul. “We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times,” Birkerts assures. “We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment.”

Read the whole essay here. Or better yet, by the whole book here. I will, too … when I have time. I’m on deadline. Oddly enough, I am finishing an essay about  … the social media.

Bryggen Hanseatic Wharf. Norway 2012 (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

The Book Haven has just arrived in Norway for the first-ever Bergen Literary Festival – tired and hungry and footsore and jetlagged, but delighted with the lovely city. For example, the Bryggen Hanseatic Wharf pictured above which dates back to Middle Ages is on UNESCO world heritage list.

We just returned from listening to a riveting onstage conversation between award-winning Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling (2011), about the Colombian drug wars, and now The Shape of the Ruins (2018), about two defining political murders in Bogotá’s past, and Spanish writer Edurne Portela. “Memory is a moral act,” said the Columbian author who spoke about the way we manipulate memory and history so we can go on. “History lies.”

“The truth of the novel is that there is no truth,” he said.

There will be more news on the inaugural festival, but meanwhile – Happy Valentine’s Day!

Bergen, the view from Mount Floyen (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

They met at the Old Vic (Youtube screenshot)

Actor Albert Finney is dead. Writer David Kirby on Facebook shared this memory, of a long-ago meeting in London:

In 1976, I saw Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in Macbeth at the Young Vic. When it was over, I felt as though I’d been electrocuted. I rose in a daze and turned to the man in the row behind me. It was Albert Finney, who died Thursday at the age of 82. He looked much as he did in this photo, impossibly handsome and seemingly unaware of it. He also appeared as stunned by what he had just seen as I was. I told him my name and held out my hand, and as he took it, he inclined his head toward me politely and said, ”Mr. Kirby.”

I don’t recall a word of our conversation, but I do remember that his voice flowed like warm syrup. People shuffled past us as we talked, but nobody made anything of him. We were just a couple of guys talking about Shakespeare. The articles that have appeared since his death say that he didn’t care that much about celebrity (he refused to attend the Oscars and turned down a knighthood), and he certainly came across that way to me. What a night: seeing McKellen and Dench throw themselves around the stage was a life changer already, and then I’d talked to Albert Finney the way you do when you run into somebody at the grocery store. “Macbeth shall sleep no more,” says the would-be king in Act 2, Scene 2, and that night I walked the streets of London for hours.